My European patent application 0,331,210 filed 18 Jan. 1985 with a claim to the priority of German application 3,406,858 itself filed 25 Feb. 1984 and my U.S. Pat. No. 4,676,050 describe a system which organizes sequentially and spacedly arriving packages, typically bags or pouches filled with particulate material, into groups and loads these groups into respective containers, normally cardboard boxes. Normally the packages are set on edge in the boxes.
Such a system has an input conveyor which operates at a constant input speed and delivers the packages one after the other at regular intervals to a transfer station where they are dropped on the upstream end of a transfer conveyor. The transfer conveyor normally runs at a stacking speed that is much slower than the input speed so that the packages, which are spaced in the transport direction on the input conveyor, are overlapped on the transfer conveyor. Once the desired number of packages has been deposited by the input conveyor onto the transfer conveyor, this transfer conveyor is briefly accelerated to a gapping speed that is much higher than its normally slow speed and even than the speed of the input conveyor so that a space is formed between the last package of the completed group and the first package of the following group.
The downstream end of the transfer conveyor feeds the groups to the upstream end of an output conveyor formed by a pair of spaced and path-defining conveyor belts that are moved at least during transfer synchronously with the transfer conveyor and that has a downstream end that opens downward above a box conveyor that moves boxes sequentially one after the other past this downstream end. The box in the transfer station is stationary or moves very slowly as the output conveyor deposits a group of the packages into it, and when the box is full the box conveyor moves the full box out of the way and an empty box into position before a new group of packages is ready to be deposited. The downstream end of the output conveyor can be constructed to move vertically, synchronously with the movement of the boxes, to actually dip down into the box in the loading station and ensure accurate and gentle deposition of the packages into the waiting box.
Such a system is relatively efficient but can jam when operated at high speed. In particular the packages can shift as they are being grouped so that the output conveyor cannot handle them correctly.